In By Heart, a poem is taught to ten people who had never seen the show before and had no idea that they were about to memorize something in front of an audience. Tiago Rodrigues teaches them lines while he tells stories about his grandmother and reads excerpts from other texts, from George Steiner to Boris Pasternak. Learning something by heart is described or perceived as an act of resistance, and Steiner is quoted: “When ten people know a poem by heart there is nothing the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo might do. This poem will survive.” Read More

Based on the classical love story from William Shakespeare, the actors tell the story of this ill­-fated romance, mixing it with a cheesecake that takes the name of the protagonists. The blood of the lovers is guava jam, the sword fights are conducted with spatulas and a bite of a Rich Tea biscuit can be a delicious alternative to a broken heart. After the success of Hamlet sou eu and Granda Pinta, Teatro Praga are returning to Teatro Maria Matos with a surprising interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic play. Read More

Darkness and red lighting kicks off the murderous and phantasmagorical mood in this puppet theatre production of Macbeth. Although hardly noticeable in the video recording, a horde of idle, motionless puppets furnish the venue, surrounding the audience – and like the audience and like Macbeth, look on, unable to dissuade fate. Puppeteering is, on many levels, a rather fitting form of staging the Scottish Thane-Become-King. Read More

A performance by Teatro Praga. Based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Henry Purcell’s The Enchanted Island.
Critics have observed how, in The Tempest, Shakespeare presents an island in which the virtues and flaws of characters are highlighted. This is the reason the island differs from character to character, depending on their past, personality, and intentions. The island depends on the personality of each person, which is why some have bad dreams and others good ones, some see images of usurpation and others a paradise island. As Harold Goddard puts it, “To innocent senses the isle itself is pure loveliness; to corrupted ones it is no better than a swamp”. Or, as Northrop Frye argues, “In this island the quality of one’s dreaming is an index of character”. Likewise, in Teatro Praga’s adaptation of The Tempest we see ourselves. Read More

In the program notes that accompany Teatro Praga’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, members of the audience discover that what they are about to see “is a celebration in the pursuit of happiness and a tribute to power to the sound of Purcell and with a contemporary flavor, our flavor”. The notes further describe how “the production wants to provide enjoyment and relaxation” as, after all, “Why theater when all you want to think about is Summer and Love?” Those sitting in the theater will soon discover that this is not what one would consider a traditional adaptation of Shakespeare, in the sense that the text has been erased and rewritten, while Purcell’s Fairy Queen and a number of contemporary plastic artists have been called upon to reinterpret the bard’s work. Read More

In this children’s production of Hamlet, “to play” implies amusing or entertaining oneself while hearing a story, but also pretending to be someone else. These two ways of experiencing theater – observing it from the audience’s perspective and playing a role in it – have been joined together so that the children realize what it truly means, as the title of the show indicates, for one to be Hamlet (“Hamlet sou eu” [“I am Hamlet”]). Read More

Teatro da Garagem’s production of Hamlet, staged by Carlos Pessoa, trusts in minimal resources: the actors are mostly dressed in black and there are very few props. The set contains only a large wooden box which the actors move around several times in order to rearrange the space according to the scenes, so the box can be a stand where the characters sit to watch the play and a grave which hides half of the gravedigger’s body before the remains of Yorick pop out. Read More

In “African Tales by Shakespeare,” director Krzysztof Warlikowski and actors from Nowy Teatr return to Shakespeare in a production which places Othello, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear, alongside with John Maxwell Coetzee’s Summertime and Wajdi Mouawad’s monologues (which were especially written for the play). In this thought-provoking five-hour theatre show, Shakespeare’s protagonists – Lear, Othello and Shylock – are depicted as outcasts who share a single fate and are thus played by the same actor. Read More

Mala Voadora is well known in Portugal for the way it questions theatrical mechanisms, which is why it usually chooses contemporary texts over a classical repertoire. For their first Shakespeare, the company asked Fernando Villas Boas, one of Portugal’s main translators of the author, to write a version of Hamlet’s First Quarto (also called the “bad quarto”), which had not been previously translated. The text was then cut and adapted for the stage with some changes (lines of Hamlet were included and minor scenes were rewritten so as to create an organic whole). Read More

Two Portuguese choreographers – Vítor Ruiz and Sofia Dias – were chosen to impersonate Antony and Cleopatra in this adaptation, in which Tiago Rodrigues creates his own text, borrowing freely from Shakespeare’s play and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. In this show, both actors are on stage: Sofia describes Antony’s behavior, while Vítor characterizes Cleopatra, their lines representing what each character sees, says and does, so that what is usually left off stage – the text’s didascalia – has here been integrated into the text. Read More

This TV version of Bene’s Otello is based on a video recording made in the Torino RAI Studios in 1979. The editing was done more than twenty years later, in 2001, by RAI Educational, commissioned by Bene himself, who supervised the entire process.
Otello’s first cue is: “E’ la causa, anima mia” (“It is the cause, my soul”, 1’01”) Read More

Rebellion arises from an otherwise peaceful world. Characters wander eternally in this war-torn world, telling their stories like specters. Peace comes after a long Civil War. Richard of Gloucester, a crippled and deformed man, observes how his brothers enjoy the power. He decides to follow a peculiar path to seize power. His excessive ambition leads him to the throne of England. RIII, adapted from Shakespeare’s history play, is a theatrical production with a minimalist stage set. The empty space on stage is filled gradually by nine characters who tell their own various stories. Read More

The worldwide and so many times staged text of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is performed by a young theatre troupe. Alone on stage, without adults, Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Benvolio and the rest of friends that – we suppose – should be on stage, in fact are seen here as an urban tribe, will invade the setting in the same way as if they were in fair Verona. A setting where bodies are both set designs and objects, complements for the body, in the sequence of events for the actor. So we shall see the characters, celebrating their bodies and tender age, in a plaza, dancing, singing, fighting and “playing” to stage Romeo and Juliet, playing that they are going a bit crazy with their tasks. In this manner, clothed with the text and white robes, these young people will go Crazy for Romeo and Juliet (Locos X Romeo y Julieta). Read More

Romeo y Julieta, a new adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, produced by OFF Teatre and directed by José Zamit was performed on July 3, 2012 at the Teatro Olympia in Valencia, Spain. OFF Teatre, an alternative fringe drama school and theatre company founded by Rafael Cruz Izquierdo (Figueres, 1967 – Valencia, 2008) in 2003, has become the benchmark for the independent performing arts in the Valencian Community (Spain). This counter-cultural space, as originally conceived by Cruz, was created in response to those fundamental and collaborative ideas enacted by most European states during the consolidation of the EU at the beginning of the XXI century. Read More

This production of King Lear by the Belarus Free Theatre was first staged at the Globe Theatre in London as part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival (April 23 to June 9), and brought back to the Globe in 2013 (September 23 to 28). A theatre in exile from a totalitarian state, the Belarus Free Theatre drew on the history of reading Shakespeare in the Soviet Union, as well as on the current situation in Belarus, to comment on the cruelty, violence, and individual vulnerability generated under the conditions of dictatorship. Read More

POOR POOR LEAR is a one-woman show by Finnish writer-performer Nina Sallinen. She portrays an elderly actress doing a farewell performance, a solo production of King Lear, in her small apartment. Read More

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Le songe d’une nuit d’été), directed by Peter Brook, Royal Shakespeare Company. Also known as Peter Brook’s Dream. Premiered in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1970 and then moved to the Aldwych Theatre in London’s West End in 1971. World tour in 1972-3. Read More

Titus Andronicus, directed by Silviu Purcarete for the National Theater in Craiova, Romania, 14 March 1992. Staged in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution, Purcarete’s production was set in fratricidal violence of the post-communist Balkans. It won several awards at festivals in Romania, Canada, and Brazil. Read More

Hamlet or Three Boys and One Girl, adapted and directed by Nikolay Georgiev was a largely improvisational production where the actors relied little on memorized cues and speeches. They used their own improvised English lines. Read More

Ur-Hamlet is a multicultural project by Odin Teatret: a performance that brings together the Odin Teatret ensemble, a group of actor-dancers from Bali, Japan, Brazil, musicians from different parts of the world, and a long-term pedagogical project for young trainees from all over the world. Read More

There were three Hamlets in the production, sometimes taking turns, sometimes together on stage. The idea reflected the schizophrenia of Hamlet. The arrangement allowed the audience to see different forms of Hamlet’s madness and confront different aspects of the protagonist’s personality. Read More

There were three Hamlets in the production, sometimes taking turns, sometimes together on stage. The idea reflected the schizophrenia of Hamlet. The arrangement allowed the audience to see different forms of Hamlet’s madness and confront different aspects of the protagonist’s personality. Read More

Translated into Greek and directed by Nikos Charalambous for the Cyprus Theatre Organization. Performed at Latsia Municipal Theatre, Nicosia, Cyprus, 27 November 2010, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of Cyprus as an independent Republic on 16 August 1960, after eighty two years of British rule. Read More

Hamlet from Gliwice. A Rehearsal or a Touch through the Pane by Lothe Lachmann Videotheatre “Beyond.” Based on Hamlet, with excerpts from the works of twentieth-century Polish playwrights Stanislaw Rozewicz and Helmut Kajzar. Read More

The film was shot as one of the episodes in Capriccio all’italiana (Italy, 1968; producer Dino De Laurentiis)
The actors: Totò (Jago), Ninetto Davoli (Otello), Laura Betti (Desdemona), Franco Franchi (Cassio), Ciccio Ingrassia (Roderigo), Adriana Asti (Bianca), Carlo Pisacane (Brabanzio). The Italian popular singer Domenico Modugno is the ‘immondezzaro’ or dustman, while the writer Francesco Leonetti, co-founder with Pasolini and Roberto Roversi of the journal Officina in 1955, plays in the film as the puppeteer Read More

Released in 1920, Svend Gade’s Hamlet: The Drama of Revenge stars Danish actress Asta Nielsen in the title role. Made in Germany, this 78 minute black and white silent film with English subtitles presents us with a Hamlet who, though actually a woman, is raised as a young man. The cast also includes Eduard von Winterstein, Mathilde Brandt, Anton de Verdier, Lilly Jacobssen, Hans Junkermann, Heinz Steida, Paul Conradi, and Fritz Achterberg.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Czech: Sen noci svatojánské) is a 1959 Czechoslovak animated film directed by Jiří Trnka. It is based on the Shakespeare play of the same name. It was entered into the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. An English-language dubbed version was made with narration by Richard Burton. Read More